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Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Fix the System

The former chief military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay said he will now be a defence witness for the driver of Osama bin Laden.This is a career Air Force Colonel people!Why would he do such a thing?Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, resigned in October after being placed under the command of torture advocate William J. Haynes. The idea that America would advocate for human rights all around the world while torturing people is bad enough, but the new chief prosecutor has also rigged the system of military tribunals at Guantanamo.Hey, don't take my word for it. This is a portion of a conversation between the two men reported in the Nation Magazine and ignored by the media.

“I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions."

The guy in charge of prosecuting the people is admitting that the system is fixed.

That is pretty amazing!You understand what he is saying? Right?Since we held them without charge and illegally in the eyes of most justice systems around the world, releasing them would be admitting the mistake. Instead of admitting we made a mistake, were going to have fake trials where the men held in cages for the last five years will be executed.And we have made mistakes.There is a new book out named, Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo.Murat Kurnaz, was a 19 year old resident of Germany and citizen of Turkey. Pakistan's security forces, looking for people to sell to American intelligence officers for the $3,000 bounty, picked him up shortly after he was married in Pakistan. German intelligence sources and the CIA knew he was innocent in September 2002. However, even after the German foreign minister spoke to Bush on his behalf, he was held until 2007.Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding and indefinite detention is what Murant, and all the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have had to deal with.His is just one example.Australia, England and Yemen have also had citizens released to them from our prison on Cuban soil.Anyone else see the grand irony of criticizing Cuban for human rights violations while we keep people in cages on the same island?Look, I'm not saying everyone there is innocent, but terrorist or not, we cannot continue to run around the world and tell people from the business end of a gun that we our about Liberty and justice if were going to do something that would be familiar to Joseph Stalin.We are suppose to be better than that.Right?Ah hell. Lets argue about flag pins some more.